


[4. Love]

by HestiasHearth



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestors (Homestuck), Gen, Slavery mention, and are instead the body of a whole sermon, but for the sake of tagging!, genocide mention, infanticide mention, these are not actually "mentions"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-19 18:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15516369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HestiasHearth/pseuds/HestiasHearth
Summary: A nearly eight sweeps old Signless writes his first sermon, and the world is so, achingly immediate when you're a kid and growing up.(The worst times were when he sat down to write but the words just would notcome,the concept dancing on the tip of his tongue and so overwhelmingly obvious in his pan but never quite making its way into plain Alternian. The written Alternian versions were always worse. But for now he would be frustrated, and never feel like he was saying enough, and just need to swallow it down and keep writing.)





	[4. Love]

**Author's Note:**

> I don't actually recommend listening to the song (see End Notes) as you read, but this work needed a title; this song, conveniently enough, has for at least a year now needed a fic in which to be referenced; and so it worked itself out.

The first sermon was juvenile and radical all at once, wrapped up in one big heretical package with the screechings of an eight-sweep-old done up like a bow. It was also written to be delivered off whatever staircase or soapbox he could find, so that was fortunately exactly what he’d need. People don’t stop in the streets for reasonable conversation with strangers. If someone is to give you their time of day, and you are neither a quadrantmate nor selling grubloaf that fell off the transport at under the imperially fixed price, you’ll want to be entertaining – and lunatics, until they become threatening, are generally entertaining.

It had been through something around sixty-three edits by the time he was willing to call it done – he had counted, mostly because there was little else to do, but he could easily be a little off. Things he thought of at five or six separate times through the night might be jotted down all at once, or one concept might take eight distinct rewrites in one go. The worst times were when he sat down to write but the words just would not _come_ , the concept dancing on the tip of his tongue and so overwhelmingly _obvious_ in his pan but never quite making its way into plain Alternian. The written Alternian versions were always worse. But by the time you put an idea to words, you’ve kind of lost all the finer points of the idea, and frankly that’s probably for the best. He would learn later that less is more – that _writing is kind of like drawing_ , she would say then, playing with his hair as he laid against her stomach, _you don’t need to give people every detail, it’s okay if you’ve got a line or two in the wrong place. You’ve just got to capture the motion of the thing._ But for now he would be frustrated, and never feel like he was saying enough, and just need to swallow it down and keep writing.

 _Hey, hi,_ one particularly bitter version began, _I’m not supposed to exist._ He couldn’t speak it anywhere, obviously, but it just felt right to write it and pretend he was going to anyway.

Another dived straight in with _when an oppressive institution has remained in power beyond living memory, when it polices its own histories and affirms its own legitimacy and leaves no room for outside perspectives or underprivileged narratives,_ and went on, and on, and on. His mother gave it a very polite listen, taking in every word and asking appropriate questions when he took a pause for them, but then very, very gently nudged him in the direction of fewer words. People interested in radical heresy, she argued, won’t be attracted by someone’s ability to empty the entire Alternian dictionary – and besides, it’s inaccessible. It’s the latter bit that won him over. Every version after that was shorter, and when she suggested sentence breaks or easier phrasings, he listened.

He couldn’t always get his hands on paper, so he made use of every bit of it: ignoring the margins and writing edge to edge, sometimes penning a new draft between crossed-out lines of an old one. The final product was spread between seventeen pages and took up only three when it was finally neatly transcribed, all his notes spread out over the ground until his mother had the sense to lay out a snuggleplane under him, lest his words get all smudged before he can copy them down and a ha’perigee of work go to waste.

 _I woke up this evening to the inside of a tent and that special feeling in your stomach that only three weeks of the same filthy water and sparsely-rationed jerky can give you,_ it began, with a strategic pause while anyone listening waited for a punchline, _and I woke up free, and with my pusher still beating, and as if by instinct we are reminded it could be worse._

_It could: we could be starving, and somewhere someone is sitting down to four courses by their standards and ten, fifteen meals by ours._

_It could: we could be enslaved, and somewhere someone is inspecting the teeth of a troll they are about to buy and own and considering only whether they can haggle the price down by a hundred._

_When a troll’s life is defined by a constant struggle to live, “it could be worse” is the best defense mechanism they have. We delude ourselves into the belief that we can only be compared to the people who are less well and less free because nothing we have is ours, because we exist on the premise that someone can decide in the next instant that we oughtn’t to. There is no mechanism by which we move up. There is no chance that we will deserve more. We live our lives keeping our heads low, because if we look up we will see luxury and we will see excess and it will still not be ours. Asking for more is a death wish, wanting more is painful, and eventually we are exhausted and we teach each other how to be in less pain. We teach our future generations how to want less. We learn to make ourselves convenient and pray that outweighs the glee anyone would get from our deaths. And that’s okay, we’re told, because as a people we need order, and order requires sacrifice._

_I have seen willing people choose to make a necessary sacrifice. A well troll may sacrifice a day’s sleep to care for a sick moirail, a dying troll may go without food to feed someone who needs to think about surviving past tomorrow. Those are done out of love, and are done willingly, and in almost every case they will tell you that making that sacrifice is the least painful option. But if we’re living this way as a sacrifice – we need order, order needs someone on top and someone below – and if this is doing any good for us, for our neighbors and for our quadrantmates, we have to wonder what is wrong with us if it still hurts._

By the time he’d copied it all out he could recite it almost from memory, but still he kept the papers in front of him to rehearse. Better to lose eye contact for a second to read, his mother reminded him whenever he got frustrated, than to learn mistakes to unlearn later. He tended to ad lib now less than he used to, but even then this draft was something special. He didn’t miss a word.

_It hurts because there is no justification. Because we turn desperately to anything that can rationalize away and justify our pain, and because we find nothing; keeping our heads down and repeating night by night it could be worse, it could be worse is never going to be enough. There are good lives to be lived. There is excess, and we are starving. There is freedom, and we are not free. The only things for which our lives are a sacrifice is a highblooded lifestyle that is unsustainable; we sacrifice our lives and our labor and our freedom so somewhere someone can live not without worry, but without thinking. We live afraid of dying so somewhere someone can live without the fear of chipping a claw._

Porrim was always an enthusiastic audience: stopping him for questions, tossing the same few sentences back and forth for ten minutes of revisions until the transition sounded right. Her strong points were grammar and syntax, not argumentation, but she knew what reservations a typical midblooded troll would have and he cared enough about them to find answers. They could go on for hours like that, him eager for any new critique she could offer, her watching with a faint sense of pride and making sure not a single sentence ended on a preposition.

_I do not consent to live and die like this. I do not, in this moment, give Alternia permission to take my life and give it to someone whose eyes I will never be allowed to meet, and I beg you not to either._

Porrim was of the strong opinion that distrustful guardians make for distrustful children. There isn’t much of an Alternian philosophy at all when it comes to parenting, parenting does not exist and it certainly does not exist in the public eye, but a restrictive mother matron had made her resentful and a restrictive culture had taught her only how to hide, and the last thing she needed was to teach him to hide from her.

Besides, she’d started to see herself in him, and that scared her. Horrorterrors know he’s the only thing that saved her. If this was what could save him, then she would take it, there was no kind of safety worth losing his excitement for life. When your child who has not smiled for weeks comes home grinning with all his teeth and enthusiastically proclaiming he’s going to start a revolution, you do not tell him your insecurities or cast the world as any darker than it already is. You go to work.

_Tonight every one of us will be presented with the opportunity to lend this empire legitimacy. They continue to hold power for a reason, Horrorterror’s Emissary knows we uphold our own suffering for a reason, but Allmother, I have to wonder what happens if we all walk away. If when they tell us we earn the right to live, we stop earning it; if when they tell us we exist to set their tables and paint their walls, they find no one to use._

_You’re thinking it means a genocide._

_At any other time, it probably does._

_Right now, we are living a genocide. We are the product of eugenics in the caverns and constant slaughter and starvation and illness aboveground, we are the survivors of a genocide perpetrated against our neighbors who are hurting too badly to be quiet, who cannot keep their heads low, and we cannot ride on that privilege any longer._

_The empire can afford to kill those of its people who cannot choose to deviate. It cannot afford to kill every one of its slaves and laborers. It cannot afford to kill an organized resistance. I promise you, if we make it clear that one troll’s death will not be enough, if we leave no “good ones” to be kept alive and groomed, there will be no foundation left upon which an empire built on exploitation can sustain itself. We are its life, we are the soil that feeds its roots and the shade that gives it comfort, and here and now we refuse to make any oppressor comfortable. They cannot kill the best resource they have, and if they do or if we walk away and survive, either way their empire will crumble and their spectrum with it._

_I cannot ask you for your life, because neither of us owns it._

_I can ask you to recognize the conscious choice you make to live, knowing trolls like you are not given that option. I can ask you to stop pretending, here and now, to deserve any more safety and wellbeing than any other troll on or off Alternia. I am asking you to make a conscious decision whose life yours will lift up, because whether you like it or not you will hurt and you will lift up someone. Choose someone who did not use you. Choose someone with less safety and less freedom if you can find them and if you cannot, try anyway, they’re out there._

_Choose to refuse to be useful, and to instead be kind._

\-------------------------------------

Now if he could deliver it to all of Alternia, even to everyone under jade at once, it would be a powerful idea.

Instead they were walking into a market – one in a poorer town, dealing in root vegetables and herbal remedies, mostly – just after the sun had gone down, and before anyone with enough luxury to shop through working hours would pass through. Still, he walked with a spring in his step, jogging ahead until he very nearly tripped over his own feet. He slowed down after that – still excited, of course, but not about to risk weeks of preparation being dashed by a skinned knee.

They were not natives of this town. They weren’t natives of any town, unless her old neighborhood could still be called some kind of home and they would ever consider repatriation, which was out of the question – so he was used to the looks people gave them. Porrim, even now, was not, and while she had no love lost for the casteist respect and maternal adoration she’d long since abandoned, it still left an unpleasant, sticky feeling under her skin.

Her son, on the other hand, very likely believed that was just what other trolls looked like, and it was a shame there was enough color in his eyes that he needed to keep his hood drawn because in moments like this she could very much use his persistent smile. Anyone near him would feel it all the same, so she was certain anyway: the way he lifted up the air around him, the way the bounce in his step found its way into your chest. She was jarred out of her musings abruptly when he tugged on her sleeve, nodding toward an empty space two stalls down where the neighboring vendors had abandoned their empty crates – not quite a soapbox, if you’re a stickler for that kind of thing, but close enough to it.

“It’s _perfect._ ”

She would argue, if she thought he was looking at the mildew-factory he planned to claim as his stage – but he, unlike her, always noticed people first, environments and things second, and he was right: as settings for radical heresy go, it was the best they could hope for. No one for a block over olive (which he didn’t _like_ caring about), quiet but not for lack of people (which he did), and hardly a stone’s throw from the market’s center. She nodded once, and he jogged the rest of the distance there, overturning one crate as though it might burn him – the distinct kind of care that comes from trying to handle old wood without getting a splinter.

He tested his weight against it with one foot and it didn’t break. That was good enough – he nudged it forward until it was even with the vendors’ tables on either side and stepped onto it with the kind of straight, shoulders-back-hips-even posture he’d learned was very important, and found himself suddenly very aware of how silly it all must look.

For a beat, to look at him from outside, it was like he'd walked through an invisible doorway and forgotten what he was doing.

Porrim raised her chin and set her head back a degree to incline her neck straight, and he copied on cue at the reminder. There was a moment in which he glanced around-

and tried to find some kind of audience among the people who had yet to spare the two a glance except to make sure they weren’t stealing, to wonder what the subgrub’s coming to, before keeping on about their business, someone across the street from him very, very slowly delivering a passionless harangue on the price of root vegetables and what they were last dark season-

and so he delivered the first half of the sermon directly to his mother’s chest, rushed, and monotone, and when he looked up someone was listening.

.

He stumbled for a second, in his face, but evidently not in his words, because he kept _hearing_ himself deliver them the way he knew them. The stranger seemed to feel the awkwardness in the air, and offered to soften it with a weird little smile, and he gave a weird little smile back and stuttered and suddenly this was a _person_ in the closest way he knew them. It's one of those moments that would come with a mutual diffusive laugh, except that he understood the importance of what he was saying and was not inclined, never, to give the impression of dismissing it, and they were, in some ways he could understand and some ways he couldn't, terrified.

This little audience remained for five or six sentences in all once he'd seen them, from "I do not consent to live and die like this" up through "they find no one to use," and by the end of it he felt like he was swaying. He might have been, and they might have been with him, but it was with an anxious shoulder-lead gesture that they scooted their way out of his line of sight and down the street, after that, and he did them the courtesy of only glancing to them once before letting them pretend not to be listening.

They were gone when it was finished, and that was okay.

(Your name is nothing, it was seven sweeps, twenty-three perigees, and four days ago today that you were given life but only another sweep and three seasons in the future that you would take a title, and your interests all coincide with your acute awareness that it is not okay, that Alternia hasn't been okay since a good deal before you were alive and you are so young and so uneducated and so small a piece of fixing it, and everything needs to happen right right now, but something did. They listened. There is a feeling in the air like the silence has broken and contrary to everything that was supposed to entail, guess what, you're still living after it.)

(What will you do?)

**Author's Note:**

> _I see a slow, simple youngster by a busy street,_   
>  _with a begging bowl in his shaking hand._   
>  _Trying to smile but hurting infinitely. Nobody notices._   
>  _I do, but walk by._
> 
> _I see a model's face on a brick wall._   
>  _A statue of porcelain perfection beside a violent city kill._   
>  _A city that worships flesh._
> 
> _I see a beaten dog in a pungent alley. He tries to bite me._   
>  _All pride has left his wild drooling eyes._   
>  _I wish I had my leg to spare._
> 
> [[Explicit sexual content warning for the song.]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxs6g54EKxI&feature=youtu.be&t=390)
> 
> I would like to, from the bottom of my heart, thank [elliptical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical) for making me aware of the incredibly Signless song from which this fic takes its title, something like a year ago. 
> 
> In case you missed it at the top - I don't actually recommend listening to the song as you read, but this work needed a title, this song needed a fic in which to be referenced, and it worked itself out! It just carries an incredibly Signless voice- probably an older Signless, in that moment! It feels, to me, like a chorus coming from the Sufferist movement, with a flashback to the Signless in this moment.
> 
> This fic was last touched, before I added the last few hundred words and opening sentence, back in June 2017.


End file.
